wtf mullenweg, you’re a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes
Can you elaborate on why this is mildly infuriating?
Mullenweg says he always manually inputs U+2019 for the apostrophe character because “the apostrophe key on the keyboard is actually the prime mark”. In the video, I search the character up, and it’s the right curly single quote, not the apostrophe. This is as infuriating as people saying “octopi”, except they also have to go to an extra mile just to make this mistake. If you want me to elaborate folder, zoom in on the apostrophe in this reply.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark
The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user’s typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]
In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.
He is going to extra lengths just to get it, and even then, it is an apostrophe like how “octopi” is now accepted as a plural form of “octopus”. The straight apostrophe also actually has a unicode name of “apostrophe”, and thus that was its original intention, as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated.
I manually input the em dash (—) with my keyboard instead of just using the nornal dash. (-)
Alt+0151
Do you feel like that’d be a lot of trouble and that you’d never feel like wasting energy on it? I get that, but I just got used to it and don’t even notice really. I just really prefer — to - in a lot of contexts.
In LaTeX, a single hyphen is just - while getting a range hyphen (the longer one) is --. I got chewed out by my graduate advisor for getting that wrong in a research paper. The difference is visibly small, but it does matter for clarity.
He’s right, though. They’re different characters, and they look different. The curved apostrophe looks much better, especially with larger fonts. I don’t use it in casual typing, but it’s important for official copy on the Web. You can use Option-Shift-] to type it without the alt code on a Mac
Everyone talking about how octopi is incorrect and at the time of this writing not a single comment contains the correct plural:
octopodes
Edit:
Nah. “Octopodes” (note, pronounced “ock-TAH-poh-deez”) is a very recent plural for the word in English. It’s not incorrect, but it’s not “the correct plural.”
There is no “correct” plural. “Octopi” is the oldest plural in English, then “octopuses,” then “octopodes.”
Actually, as the article says, “octopodes” is older than “octopi” as the real Latin plural; the latter was invented when a bunch of fancy Englishmen saw that pig Latin was in fashion.
I said oldest English plural. Octopi is the oldest plural in English for the English word “octopus.”
We took a word that sounded to us like a second declension Latin word and gave it a second declension plural. This wasn’t accurate in Latin, since it’s actually a third declension noun with weird Greek endings (as a word lifted from Greek).
But English doesn’t use declensions the same way Latin does. We just know that many words that end in -us get pluralized as -i in English (alumnus -> alumni, etc.) and so “octopus” as “octopi” sounds right to English-speaking ears.
Then some people were like, “Nah, it should follow English plural rules” and said “octopuses.” Then others were like, “Well, as a Latin word FROM a Greek word we should be using the proper third declension Greek ending plural from Latin” and we got to “octopodes,” which matches up with the Attic Greek masculine plural, «ὀκτώποδες» but pronounced differently because Latin didn’t differentiate the same way between Ο and Ω. And then we bastardize the pronunciation in English to blend the Latin and the Greek and our even further weakened English vowel to the point where we almost say “ah” for omega. (Which is why I wrote it that way.)
Anyway, the point is we shouldn’t be prescriptivist about the plural of the word octopus in English. Just let octopi and octopuses and octopodes live in peace with one another.
Octopus isn’t a Latin derived word but Greek. You can’t apply Latin grammar to Greek words.
There is no absolutely correct plural for octopus and in any respect, no grammatical rules should be prescriptivist (you must do this) but prescriptivist (people tend to do this)
This is the WordPress drama you’re focusing on right now?
Yes. What, is there a Florida-sized hurricane putting out tornados as we speak?
Actually no, I was listening to the podcast to try to find facts and polish his Wikipedia article, partly to see what a specific paragraph sourced to the podcast with no timestamp meant.
Mullenweg just took over AFC so that everyone who installed the non-pro version will now have his version instead. It’s part of this whole crazy drama in the WordPress ecosystem right now. It’s just funny to see anyone saying anything else about Mullenweg/ WordPress at the moment.
Surely for such a common character it would be easier to make a new keyboard layout that always types the preferred apostrophe when that key is pressed?
